Will the [H] crew be reviewing the DFI LANPARTY UT ICFX3200 T2R/G?

[RaidalG]

I have the DFI Infinity 975X now and would love to see the [H] crew apply their special reviewing skills to this motherboard (when you can get one that is)

As a Crossfire user with 1900XT and 1900XTX's in Crossfire on my DFI Infinity 975X, I'd really be interested in seeing you guys' take on the above board in Crossfire at > 1600x1200 gaming resolutions. (I game on that 24" Sony/HP CRT that weights a ton and I likes my high Rez . . .)

Given that no game out is CPU bound (As you point out so well), I'd like to see how this Crossfire optimized board affects eye candy at high resolutions compared to existing Crossfire/SLI configurations. (Games like Oblivion, NWN2, maybe even EQ2)

It'd be nice to see if AMD really can build a better Intel board than Intel can

 

[RaidalG]

No answer on this one? I haven't seen anyone touch this issue with any real test data to back it up yet. I was hoping the [H] crew would be the first . . .

 

[Dan_D]

No answer on this one? I haven't seen anyone touch this issue with any real test data to back it up yet. I was hoping the [H] crew would be the first . . .

Someone posted about this in another thread. I think Kyle has ordered one, but apparently he had no prior warning to this chipset or board launch. He found out about it when the rest of the planet did. Until today I didn't know when this board was coming out.

 

[FrgMstr]

DFI has gotten to the point where they no longer contact us. Their PR people seem to not want exposure with HardOCP, and therefore are not really on my radar anymore. Also I gauge interest in our forums and honestly I have not seen much till this recent RD600 board. I did buy their RD600 board last week so we should get it this week and I am ready to get to testing it. We have another CPU gaming focused article on the burner now.

 

[RaidalG]

Thanks Dan and Kyle. You guys are the best.

I'm fairly happy with my infinity but honestly wonder if their is an increase in crossfire performance with the new board making it worth replacing. I already run 3.2GHz stable and know I won't get much more than 3.4 on air cooling regardless of what motherboard I use, so the "upgrade or not" issue mainly rests on crossfire performance and hard drive stability for me.

I'm also wondering if the Raid controllers on the Lanparty are up to snuff. I was able to pick up three 74G Raptor's for a good price thanks to your hot deals forum and plan to run my Crossfire system on Vista with those three in Raid 5. I haven't heard of any issues with the infinity's Intel Raid controller so far.

 

[FrgMstr]

Thanks Dan and Kyle. You guys are the best.

I'm fairly happy with my infinity but honestly wonder if their is an increase in crossfire performance with the new board making it worth replacing.

I SERIOUSLY doubt it.

 

[Dan_D]

Thanks Dan and Kyle. You guys are the best.

I'm also wondering if the Raid controllers on the Lanparty are up to snuff. I was able to pick up three 74G Raptor's for a good price thanks to your hot deals forum and plan to run my Crossfire system on Vista with those three in Raid 5. I haven't heard of any issues with the infinity's Intel Raid controller so far.

I can't say without having worked with the board in question. Typically ATI's south bridges are a little dated featurewise, but the chipsets themselves have always been solid in my experience.

I do not know currently what south bridge the board in question uses, but I would expect it to perform comparably to similar Intel and NVIDIA solutions.

 

[Mabrito]

Going a little off topic but what is it with DFI these days. They are hardly releasing any new boards. It seems like they are dropping the Lanparty series and just sticking with the Infinity. The completely ignored the Core 2 market except with there Infinity board which I here isnt that bad though. We seen a 680i board but it still has yet to be released if it is at all. I just cant see why DFI is "slow" as many people want there boards since they have a good past with overclock results.

 

[FrgMstr]

I am guessing we have pretty much seen the last of them.

 

[The Goose]

What exactly do you mean by that, Kyle? Would it be a poor choice to buy a ICFX3200 (for a rig that's probably going to last me a while) or even the Infinity because DFI might be going under? They really do seem to be falling, is there any chance that they might get back up? Sorry about all of the speculation questions.

 

[RaidalG]

Hey now, this is a NO bashing HardOCP thread thank you very much!!

On topic, I have the infinity, and it has performed great so far, and was very easy to overclock. The only real negative is that you really need after market northbridge cooling if you are going to OC above 350FSB or so.

I can't speak about their future, but they did have a competing C2D board in the Infinity, it just didn't have DFI's normal plethora of bios options for OC. Due to most people's awareness of the Lanparty name, I think the board was overlooked initially with its infinity tag. It is a great affordable C2D board that will allow the average OC'er all the room they need. Of course their ARE better offerings for the extreme crowd.

 

[Dan_D]

Your reviews always state how DFI boards are only for hardware enthusiasts. I probably wouldn't contact you either if I knew you were going to tell half your readers my product isn't for them regardless of how it performs. Its not like people have to actually go in and adjust every bios option for the board to operate.

Generally, the DFI boards do take a fair amount of tweaking to get working and in some cases like their NF4 boards, you often need very specific parts for the machine to work at all. Additionally some people report that they have good luck and don't need any real tweaking. This leads me to believe that there is an inconsistency in quality of individual boards. Because of those things it's hard to recommend a DFI board for a non-overclocked system when there are boards that you can literally drop in and be rock solid without any tweaking or adjustments what so ever.

We don't kiss board makers' asses around here. If a board sucks then that's what we'll say. If a board has some issues, we try to touch on all of those and report on them. There are plenty of boards that I've recommended for stock system usage and some I wouldn't. In the past my experiences with DFI have varied. In most cases I've found that they were just too problematic for the novice and not worth it for stock users who could find cheaper boards that do the job just as well with less headaches.

Keep in mind I wouldn't recommend a 680i chipset based board to a novice either. People who know what they are doing are having a hard enough time making them work correctly. Another point I'd like to make is that I am generally excited about DFI boards in general as they've improved alot over the years and recently, they really have taken the spot that used to be held in the market by ABIT. (Back when abit deserved capital letters in their name.) Like ABIT, DFI caters the enthusiast, and that's primarily who is interested in reading these reviews.

 

[RaidalG]

We don't kiss board makers' asses around here. If a board sucks then that's what we'll say. If a board has some issues, we try to touch on all of those and report on them. There are plenty of boards that I've recommended for stock system usage and some I wouldn't. In the past my experiences with DFI have varied. In most cases I've found that they were just too problematic for the novice and not worth it for stock users who could find cheaper boards that do the job just as well with less headaches. /QUOTE]

And this is EXACTLY why I have always come here to make decisions on hardware purchases first. I know I will get your take, good or bad on a board, without pressure from the maker. I know the reviews will contain both facts as you tested them and your opinions which you clearly state are just that. Too many reviewers out there are biased to the point of a loss of objectivity and I don't see that here.

This infinity is the first motherboard I have bought without your direct review and recommendation, and I only did so due to the lack of availability of other boards at that time. I have never been steered wrong by your recommendations and I don't expect that I will.

Ok, sorry this sounds like a suck up post; you guys get too much negative and not enough positive from us readers and I had to say my piece.

Thanks for the witty yet professional approach!!